The thief and the cobbler
For the next eight years, that's just what he did: all of his projects were taken on to finance this dream picture, he hired the great Ken Harris (who had worked at Warner Bros. Williams was so delighted by the character, and by the artwork he created, combining vaguely Persian motifs and minimalist, loose line drawings in a very 1960s idiom, that he decided to pour all of his energies into a Nasruddin feature. The project began its extraordinary life in 1964, when Canadian-born 31-year-old Williams, owner of the UK advertising animation studio Richard Williams Productions, was hired to illustrate a collection of stories by Idries Shah adapting traditional folklore about the wise fool Mulla Nasruddin. But as the name makes clear, The Thief and the Cobbler is the main focus.Īs well it might be! The Thief and the Cobbler is among the most important pieces of animation ever produced, or semi-produced as the case may be. This is indeed the major project of Garrett Gilchrist, the creator (we might more accurately say "curator") of The Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled Cut, available on YouTube at Gilchrist's invaluable channel TheThiefArchive, where he has gathered as much of the rare work of animator and director Richard Williams as could be managed without cease-and-desist letters (on the subject of which: if you live in the United States, Canada, or the United Kingdom, you might find the Recobbled Cut sometimes missing a part, but there are surely ways around that).
THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER MOVIE
Parts of it exist, and from these parts, we can generally extrapolate what the movie might have been like. It's important to get it read into the record, right up front, that in a very real and very important sense, The Thief and the Cobbler doesn't actually exist.
![the thief and the cobbler the thief and the cobbler](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/09/22/arts/22THIEF/22THIEF-videoSixteenByNineJumbo1600-v2.jpg)
A review requested by Robert Hamer, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.